


D. C. Al Coda

by butterycrumpets



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Established Relationship, Music, Near Future, POV First Person, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 20:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1111351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butterycrumpets/pseuds/butterycrumpets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is given a diagnosis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	D. C. Al Coda

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deductions_of_a_Psychopath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deductions_of_a_Psychopath/gifts).



I have never understood our collective idolisation of living fast and dying young.  
I had never imagined myself with anyone else. In the spirit of my ancestors, I planned to live until my dark hair became as the silver rivers of the parochial legends of my youth and my skin crumpled like the bed sheets of Holmes Manor. Sunsets and quiet evenings indoors by the fireplace would have sufficed in making me a perfectly happy old man. A relaxing pastime or two, fishing or beekeeping, would have kept me busy in the long, quiet days. For reasons unknown to even myself, and improbable to anyone who has known me, I always envisioned myself with someone to share in this childlike plan of the future.  
I would have had John with me.  
Had it not been for the most tragic of events, I would have had him with me.  
For the past few months I have had a dream. I never can remember where it begins, somewhere in a haze of happiness and a plethora of pictures and that dance one after the other until he is there with me. His hand, wrinkled as my own. Somehow not even age can divide us in my dream and we are together once more. His bulldog, Gladstone, stretched out on the rug before us. The window is open just enough to scatter the embers of the crackling fire before I take his hand in my own and silently thank anyone listening that I am with him. We do not fear death because of our lack of faith, instead it has given us the greatest reason there is to stay alive. I hold his hand in mine. Dreams were the first and last times I was with him.  
Had I any belief that somewhere John Watson was still in existence; surely I would have no reason to weep than my own selfishness? I know now that he has gone, slipped away into darkness and nothingness as deep and endless as my own sorrow. He has spoken his last words. There is nothing left for him, and yet I feel as though it were the same for me.  
I had received a phone call from Sarah informing me that John had collapsed in the middle of one of his clinics and had been rushed to hospital.  
My first thought, as a non-medical man, had been some sort of underlying, genetic brain condition that had gone unnoticed for years.  
I will never forget that plane ride from Dubai, where I was on a case, to London where John had been hospitalised.  
"Mr Holmes!" the receptionist recognised me, I think partially from my reasonably public job as a private consulting detective and partially from the bedraggled look of horror which screamed ‘my partner of ten years just had a seizure out of the blue, I haven’t slept in three nights and I’ve just got off a six hour plane ride’.  
It is true that I hadn’t slept at all, mainly because of the depth to which I had delved into the suspected Sheikh’s case without John there, and the news that he had collapsed didn’t exactly help.  
John looked so small in that hospital bed. _Please, God, let him live ___I remember thinking furiously.  
That night, or early the next morning we received his MRI results. I knew what they were when I saw the rehearsed sympathy in the eyes of the doctor. His small smile told me it was less than six months.  
Tumours like buds of a weed had blossomed throughout the hemispheres of John’s brain, setting their roots into his memories and sense of balance.  
He was given "about a month" then we were left alone.  
I knew I wasn’t going to waste a single second with John, and yet as soon as the doctors cleared out of the abysmal little hospital room in which I was planning to see for the next "about a month", I suddenly felt utterly exhausted.  
My dear John gave me a knowing smile and told me to sleep, he promised he would still be there when I woke up. I have taken to memorising these words.  
"When did you last sleep?"  
"It doesn’t matter." I waved a hand, batting away any worries he had for me.  
"It matters to me, you matter to me." John told me in his clipped, matter of fact tone.  
"Three nights ago." I admitted.  
He sighed, leaning back in the firm, white hospital pillows.  
"I won’t be able to sleep with this itching potion they’re injecting me with, so don’t bother waiting for me to."  
"I don’t want to sleep if you’re awake." I sounded like a child, I knew, but I didn’t care.  
He rolled his eyes.  
"I’ve got a month or so they said, and if you really plan on staying up till November then be my guest, but I won’t have you dying before me. Go to sleep, and I’ll still be here when you wake up."  
It was the first time either of us mentioned the ‘d’ word, death, dying, dead, die. But he said it and I didn’t want to argue for fear of breaking down then and there.  
I leant back in my strange reclining chair and shut my eyes. Despite my exhaustion, sleep had never felt so far away. Still, I remained stagnant for a good fifteen minutes before cracking an eyelid open.  
John was still awake, writing lazily with the pen I bought him for our tenth anniversary. The scuffed yellow folder told me it was a patient’s, and I remember feeling distinctly sick that he was continuing on his work even when he knew he wouldn’t be there for the appointment for which he was presumably writing notes.  
I leant forward so I was folding my arms on his bed and the two of us shared a long and complicated look which I shan’t try to describe. After a while, feeling far more comfortable now I was closer to John, I dropped my head into my arms and drifted off to sleep just like that.  
"I love you." His voice resounded in my ears.  
To this day, I’m not sure if those words I heard were a whisper from a dying man to his sleeping lover, or a figment of my exhausted mind.  
As I awoke from a dream of nothingness, reality began to blur. I was conscious of a weight upon my head, a crescendo of a beeping noise leading to the molto allegro of approaching footsteps.  
My eyes snapped open and in one instant I realised everything. I didn’t need any proof, I just knew.  
John was dead.  
His hand, which had been laid upon my head judging by the compression of my curls, had slipped to my neck and was already cold and yellowing. Thin purple veins branched out randomly over his neck and seemed to lead nowhere at all. His eyes unseeingly bore into my own as I was pushed away by nurses and doctors convinced they could resurrect him.  
I would have had him with me for the rest of my days.  
The two of us would have grown old together, our memories stretched out into infinity, as numerous as sunsets or broken waves on the shore. The concerto that was our relationship ended with his life that day, and my heart was to suffer the same fate as his promise to be there when I awoke.  
Lestrade and Anderson arrived later that day. Later came Molly and Stamford, then Mycroft.  
In that look I shared with John, we had agreed to call and tell everyone the next morning. We had planned for him to be alive.  
Harry arrived to sign some important family documents which, due to the lack of legality, I was not permitted to. The days blurred together and I found sleep in odd places, like John’s old armchair or the carpet in front of the fireplace. When I slept in these places, the dreams would stay away and I could distract my thoughts from inevitably taking me to him.  
It was only two days after his death that I cracked.  
The first tears came when I saw Harry’s daughter holding her uncle’s hand. John would never see her grow up as he had so wanted to. Mycroft was quick to steer me away when he saw the tell-tale blinking which meant tears were not far away.  
I wept on my brother’ shoulder. Had he not been there I would have wept still.  
As I lay in the armchair, not sleeping, I had imagined the things we could do in that month. We would visit St Bart’s, stay with Harry and her family for a night, cook a last meal in the apartment, play cluedo until early in the morning, write letters and ultimately live out his last month indulging ourselves in each other. He had not survived the first night, and that was what outraged me to the point of crying in front of my older brother.  
I simply did not, and do not care about it anymore. The it in this case being the ridiculous assumption that age means maturity and the need to be cold hearted to the point where my shoulders were granite and my face a stoic mask of apathy.  
Harry sorted out the funeral arrangements, and I was left mainly to my grief. My grief and I, I found, took up an entire room. Every once and a while I would emerge from upstairs and find people leaving rooms as I entered to make way for my dark companion. Perhaps it was my eyes that gave him away. I was told by Molly once that my eyes were sad.  
His money and things were left mainly to Harry and any family she had, one of his old army buddies he hadn’t seen in years got his dog tags, and to me, the lawyer handed a faded yellow folder.  
My stony composure didn’t falter.  
For the next few nights one thought swirled around and around endlessly rocking against the sides of my head demanding attention no matter how many times I deleted it. John’s hand, had he laid it on my hair for warmth, out of habit? Or had he been trying to wake me, perhaps he realised it was happening and I had been asleep. I had slept through his final moments.  
There was no way I could know, and after threatening the security guard for any security footage which he assured me didn’t exist, I finally brought myself to open the folder.  
_Hello Sherlock,_  
_I’m writing this at the hospital, but you probably know that from the smell of the folder of the angle of the letters or something. I think perhaps you’ve fallen asleep_ _now, but I never could tell._  
_With a month to live, my promise of forever and undying love has little resonance however I hope you’ll accept it. For as long as I live, a year, a month, one night, I_ _will love you more than I have loved anything or anyone before. I hope you know that you mean my happiness. I need only think of your name and a silly grin_ _spreads across my face. Even after ten years, I still love you, Sherlock._  
_I know it sounds awful of me but I’m dead so I don’t give a fuck: I don’t want you to change, now that I’m gone. All I want is to know that the world will still have its_ _only consulting detective, and then I shall be a happy ghost._  
_Oh and feel free to write me a piece on the violin, call it ‘Ballad of the Blogger’. Then I’ll be a very happy ghost. I only wish I could hear it, but I suspect I’ll get plenty_ _of you in the next month or so._  
_I don’t know why, but I felt as though I should write this now. So thanks for the month (hopefully more) that you’ve no doubt given me, but know that even if I die_ _tonight, I die a very happy man because I was yours._  
_Sorry I can’t be there for you anymore,_  
_Don’t stop being the brilliant, amazing, genius pain in the arse you are._  
_John_  
I flipped frantically through the rest of the book, my tears staining little circles in the pages as I found nothing.  
It may interest you to know that I did write John a sonata, just this morning I finished it.  
At the end of a piece, the composer may have it finish at the double bar, or they can have the performer repeat the piece and continue on to the coda, a tailpiece that sits quietly, unnoticed until the words D. C. Al Coda appear and the natural progression from bar to bar is jarringly interrupted. It seems the composer of our lives is ready to let me move on to the coda, I'm done now, John.  
This is my coda.  
This is my note.


End file.
